That was going to happen, any second.
Any second.
Once the four of us had struggled out of the broken window, we ran.
Dad, grey with fear, attempted to gather up Birdie in his arms as we stumbled along the pavement, trying to dodge the scrum around us, but it wasn’t a smooth movement and she bobbed awkwardly in his arms, her face one terrified question mark. Over Dad’s shoulder, her eyes met mine and I tried to say sorry, but my mouth was all twisted, and the wave was so close and so loud she wouldn’t have heard me anyway.
Mum gripped my hand in hers as we ran, making strange sobbing noises.
The wave was now just outside the harbour wall, just a few paces away.
It will turn back, I thought.
But it didn’t turn back. It charged.
Leapt over the wall with greedy, outstretched, frothing, white fingers. Shut the little dog up for ever. Ripped hands out of hands, people from people. And that had been that. The bruise I’d always been told to admire had turned into a bruiser and finished us right off.
I couldn’t remember coming back from the Crab Pot because I hadn’t come back.
Not alive anyway.
I was dead. I had drowned.
I held my fingernails up to my face. I hadn’t bitten them off. They’d been ripped off. I took in my ragged clothes, shredded trainers, those shells sticking out of my legs. Now they made sense. Born by the sea, died by the sea. Exit: me.
And if Dad had been with me right then and there, he’d probably have made it all about Art, by saying something meaningful in that philosophical way he had. Something like: ‘Well, Franks, really that’s got a bittersweet symmetry when you think about it’ or ‘Maybe we do always return to the source of our own beginnings.’ But he wasn’t with me and anyway he’d have been wrong.
I wasn’t a work of art. I wasn’t a thought-provoking allegory.
I was dead.
Well, technically, I was dead-ish.
I WAS DOING pretty well for myself, as far as death went. This was death with added features. I could still walk. Talk. Waggle my fingers in front of my face. The only thing I couldn’t do, apparently, was communicate with the living. Or feel physical pain where pain should be. It was a strange sensation, not having to breathe. My lungs didn’t work. My chest didn’t rise. I was just rawness, stunned with bright shock.
I closed my eyes and listened, numb, as my brain whispered questions. Questions like: Why had only I come back? Was I a ghost? A spirit? A ghoul? If I was dead, was I meant to call my body a corpse now? I stared down at myself and shuddered. And then thought: Does it matter what I call it? I had died. We had died. The shock of it shrieked through me like a forest fire. My brain whispered: What happens now?
But, most importantly of all, where were the rest of my family? And how was I meant to fill in the time until they came back?
Because they were coming back, right?
Right?
After a while, the rescue crew appeared at the top of the staircase. I automatically moved to the side of the step I was sitting on, but then a dreadful thing happened. The woman walked straight through me.
It was a sickening sensation. It was like being squished and shoved by a herd of water buffaloes. As her body moved through mine, everything I thought should remain in one place, like my lungs and kidneys and all those other delicate organs that shouldn’t, as a rule, be messed about with, shifted to the side to accommodate her. I felt like a tube of toothpaste being squeezed.
And worse than all of that was the flavour it left in my mouth. Urgh, the taste.
Have you ever tasted human flesh?
Actually, don’t answer that. Let’s just assume the answer is no. Long story short, it’s nothing like chicken. It’s disgusting. I tasted muscle and fat and blood and also some hastily digested bacon and eggs that were roughly twelve hours old. A mouthful of body.
I tasted other things too. Emotions. Traces of thoughts. Sorrow and grief and fatigue. It was like something wet and cold crawling across my tongue.
She emerged out of me with a small but audible squelch. And then, because I hadn’t moved from the step, it happened AGAIN.
And then ONCE MORE JUST FOR FUN.
Once they’d all had a go, I wanted to be sick. The sour aftertaste of three humans mingled on my tongue.
The three of them gathered in the hallway. They looked shattered.
Not Mum looked into the faces of the others. ‘I’m calling it. Agreed?’
After a pause, the other Nots nodded.
She reached for her walkie-talkie. ‘This is Rescue, over,’ she said.
The device in her hands gave out a blare of static.
Someone said, ‘What’s the report, over?’
‘No survivors found. House checked thoroughly. We presume the family perished down in the harbour. There are no coats or boots in the porch and the house is empty. Over.’
Over.
There was a pause, then the static voice said, ‘We’ll circle back. Get ready to leave in approximately twelve minutes, over.’
They moved towards our broken front door. Tall Man rubbed his eyes and hung back. Not Mum touched his shoulder.
‘Ed,’ she said gently, ‘we’ve done all we can. There’s no one here.’
He sighed. ‘I just … keep feeling like we’ve missed something, you know? I have the strongest feeling that someone’s still here.’
Is he talking about me? Can he …
